This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 13, 2008 - Missouri's higher education board is shooting for a milestone next year. If state lawmakers honor all the board's spending requests, funding for core higher education programs would surpass the $1 billion mark for the first time in state history. The actual amount requested is $1.03 billion for these basic programs. Current spending is $960 million.
But, as welcome as it may be, the budget proposal does little to address one key issue: the affordability of a college education. Missourians wonder if their children may be robbed of a productive future, priced out of a degree because of rapidly rising tuition.
The average tuition and fees for full-time students at four-year public colleges in Missouri increased by 33.5 percent between 2002 and 2006; tuition and fees at community colleges jumped by nearly 25 percent during the same period. Meanwhile, Missouri's need-based financial aid dipped nearly 68 percent below the national average by 2006. It's no wonder that both candidates for governor -- Republican Kenny Hulshof and Democrat Jay Nixon -- have promised either tuition relief or more direct assistance to make college more affordable and reverse Missouri's ranking of 47th in per capita spending for higher education.
Hulshof wants to boost spending on higher education by building on outgoing Gov. Matt Blunt's three-year effort to restore higher education funding to its level before 9/11. That attack plunged the nation into a recession, causing states to sharply cut spending for many programs, including higher education.
After the recession, many states poured more money into higher education, but Missouri did not. That prompted Blunt's promise to increase higher education spending by 4.4 percent a year for three years. He has done that for two years, and it will be up to the next governor to honor the third-year commitment.
On top of Blunt's commitment, Hulshof promises to boost higher education funding by 2 percent a year, plus an amount to offset inflation. While conceding that this plan wouldn't make up for all the money state colleges and universities lost after 9/11, Hulshof argues that for once, institutions would get a steady amount of funding.
Nixon, on the other hand, is focused on making college more affordable. To that end, Nixon wants to expand the state's A-Plus program. He would make it available to families with household income as high as $80,000, and he would expand eligibility to include students who graduate from community colleges and move to four-year schools. The program now provides free tuition to community college students meeting certain guidelines.
Medicaid vs Higher Ed -- or Medicaid and higher ed?
State Sen. Gary Nodler, R-Joplin, head of the appropriations committee, calls the proposals from both candidates "challenging and ambitious," but he says Hulshof's ideas are more realistic than Nixon's because Nixon is promising to restore Medicaid cuts as well as spend more money on higher education.
"Some of what Nixon is proposing for higher education I would favor," Nodler says. "But you can't do both. To restore the Medicaid (cuts), you'd have to decimate spending for higher education."
Nixon is convinced there's enough money for both. Spokesman Oren Shur says that budgets are about priorities. Missouri should spend money on people programs and refrain from programs like Blunt-backed tax credits that, Shur says, benefit wealthy developers.
Nodler blames the cuts in education on Democratic governors because, he says, they wanted to spend more on Medicaid at the expense of higher education. But others, such as Paul Wagner, Missouri's deputy commissioner of higher education, says the story is more complicated. Wagner says part of the problem is that Missouri is a low-tax state, meaning it never had as much money from the start to address all its needs.
Blunt and MOHELA
Blunt was strongly criticized for funding capital improvements in higher education through the sale of assets of the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. Hulshof has backed Blunt's action, but Nixon has yet to say whether he would reverse it if he becomes governor.
Neither candidate has talked much about the larger issues beyond their short-term higher education goals. Wagner notes that the state has a lot of higher education funding needs beyond financing core programs.
Worker Shortages
Blunt tried to address some needs through Caring for Missourians. He favored spending $39.8 million to help the state address worker shortages in some health-care fields. The Higher Education Board says funding that program is essential because 8 percent of pharmacy positions and 10 percent of nursing positions go unfilled.
Dental training in Missouri also is in shorter supply. In past years, some Missouri students got their dental training at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, but that arrangement ended. Officials then scrambled to expand the dental program at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. The upshot? Overcrowding in clinics, laboratories and classrooms. The proposed higher education budget calls for more staff and expanded facilities to handle overcrowding at Kansas City.
Beyond the Basics
Everybody agrees it's crucial to develop the state's budding high-tech economy, focusing on life and plant sciences. But what steps will Missouri actually take to do that? Nodler says there's no reason Missouri couldn't have a high-tech corridor rivaling the one in North Carolina, but that development begins with investments in education.
"There's a real cost to Missouri for not having an investment in first-class higher education," he says. He adds that Missouri needs to have "the same sort of intellectual capital in research capacity that exists in states we compete with."
Nobody is sure how Missouri will get to that point, but Roger N. Beachy, president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, takes note of promising small steps, such as the associate degree program in biotechnology at the St. Louis Community College. That program is important, he says, because it will put more science-oriented students in the pipeline.
Beachy says Missouri is hurt because it lacks the home-grown technicians, those with associate and bachelor's degrees. "That's a shame," he says. "Here we are in the middle of a revolution in biotechnology that could build a future and an economic base and we lack well-trained research technicians, research leaders and have to look outside."
That puts Missouri at a disadvantage, he says. The state must begin "feeding the pipeline, as it were, with young students by making science exciting. Students simply aren't taught exciting biology, new biology, because their teachers don't understand it well enough to teach it to them."
In his own lab, Beachy says he is hard-pressed to find workers with adequate background in basic science and would be lucky if he found an African-American in his own field of plant biology.
He says, "We need to revamp education in Missouri if we want knowledge-based industries to be a part of our economic success in the future."
The Tobacco Settlement
The large steps, Beachy says, include investing proceeds from the tobacco settlement money into scientific research. The state, he says, is investing a lot less than it should.
During the last funding cycle, Missouri invested more than $13 million in tobacco settlement money for this research. That may sound like a lot, but some states -- Massachusetts and Maryland among them -- are setting up $1 billion for high-tech ventures. Still, Beachy says he's pleased that the tobacco settlement is providing some funding.
Beachy says that a 10-year commitment to use the maximum tobacco settlement money for high-tech research would help Missouri move into the top 20 percent of states investing in science and technology. But Beachy stresses repeatedly that it's not just money that's holding Missouri back. The state needs workers well-trained in the sciences to help Missouri move forward.
Missourians only have to look as far as Kansas City, to the Stowers Institute for Biomedical Research, to understand the quality of workers and kind of jobs that need to be filled to help Missouri make its mark.
At the moment, Stowers is looking for a range of science-oriented workers, including research and lab technicians, to help it become a leading innovator in biomedical research. Some positions require undergrad degrees in physics, biology, biochemistry, genetics and other fields where workers in Missouri might not be plentiful.
Big Dreams, Little Hope
Supporters of higher ed have big dreams -- but unfortunately they also have little hope. Wagner, the deputy higher education commissioner, says his agency might not convince the next governor and legislature to crack the $1 billion mark.
The entire higher ed package would require a 11.5 percent increase in state funding, he says. Because of the economic downturn, he expects that money will be really tight in Jefferson City next year. "It's probably not very likely that we'll get the whole 11.5 percent increase," he says.
The agency will be lucky, he says, if Jefferson City simply follows through on the third year of Blunt's commitment to increase higher education spending to its pre-9/11 level.
